By Jemima
Where do dramatic people go to, to be freely dramatic? A drama workshop!
It was an exciting and fun-filled day for some of the dramatic ones (me included) at the Basic Drama Skills Workshop with Colin Kirton. This was a time and place where we could, and were in fact required to, be dramatic, but with greater purpose.
On Sept. 28, 2024, 16 of us aspiring “actors” gathered early in the morning with much excitement to meet our fellow drama people and for a day of learning from the great Colin Kirton himself. We started the day with simple acting icebreakers, which set the tone for the multiple acting exercises that were to come later in the day.
Colin was an amazing instructor and teacher, who walked us through the basic ingredients for acting while sharing some of his personal experiences with us. What stood out to me as one of the fundamentals of acting shared by Colin is the fact that an actor always plays toward a goal.
To put all that we learned into practice at the end of the day, we were given a script with a basic dialogue without any context and was tasked to memorise the same in a short period of time. We were subsequently called out and were given different contexts and scenarios before we had to execute the dialogue based on that. This was a chance for us to apply the principles we learned earlier, and it proved to be challenging to constantly apply our mind to act towards a goal within the context given.
Personally in the past, I have found myself caught up with the motion of just acting out a character or wanting to impress the audience without sparing a thought of the goal or message intended to be conveyed in each and every scenario acted out on stage. Through this workshop, I am reminded that there is so much more to acting and how much of a message can be conveyed through impactful and thoughtful acting. I look forward to applying the newly acquired skills and knowledge in our upcoming Christmas production coming to PJEFC this Christmas!
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📆 Mark your calendar for an upcoming spectacular Christmas production on 25 December 2024 at 10 AM. Stay tuned for the title of the production.